dummied

A new home

At a glance

This entry was written on February 25, 2007.

The entry prior to this is entitled Going Indy.

The entry following this is entitled Media Temple, Rails and Mint.

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This entry has been tagged as CSS, MovableType, Thissite, rails.

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Nobody should be able to find this yet, but dummied.org, the temporary/permanent home of the artist formerly known as dummied.net is now live.

With all the changes in my life recently (moving from print to web, moving from Connecticut to Indiana, etc.), it seemed high time to update the digital homefront as well. This design's a little (OK ... a lot) less print-centric, a little more free-flowing and a lot simpler (in a lot of ways ... but more on that later).

I still haven't touched this in IE, and I can guarantee it looks horrendous right now due to an excessive reliance on pngs, and there are still corners that need sweeping, but it's a nice, stable platform to build off of.

Speaking of a nice, stable platform to build off of, I've abandoned Movable Type for good. This site, after a brief foray into Wordpress, is running off SimpleLog, a small-scale blogging app developed in Ruby on Rails by Garrett Murray.

Why SimpleLog? Well, in addition to all the reasons Garret Dimon has already gone over, I'm working almost exclusively in Ruby and Rails at work now. My original plan was to build this in Wordpress, but after using Rails so much at work, I'd lost my comfort level with php to a great degree and digging back into the WP templating code just made me hurt. So, I knew I wanted Rails.

The problem was, so many Rails blogging engines try to further abstract the code from the design by using Liquid templates (Mephisto's a prime example). Erb is practically a templating language as it is, and it's one I use daily at work. SimpleLog lets me stick with that. So, rather than building my own blogging app (which I actually started ... ), I just built off of SimpleLog instead.

The one kind of irritating thing I found with SimpleLog, though, was that it's helper methods (in my quick glance) seemed to include a lot of ... well ... text. I'm a recovering English major, and I tend to be a little picky about how things are said ... or at least, I'd rather I be the one saying them. So, I fiddled with a few helper methods, changed a few strings and bent what I needed to get what I wanted.

I have a few other niggles (view source on the archives page for one of them), but all in all, SimpleLog (with a heaping helping of an understanding wife) got me from CSS/HTML mockup to operational site in the course of a weekend.

As for a goodbye to Movable Type, it's a fond one. I took my first steps in learning CSS from MT and owe it a debt of gratitude for many years of faithful service. In the end, though, my need to fiddle with the innards and my inability to cotton to Perl spelled the death-knell.